B2B Content Marketing for brands that want to STAY HUMAN
👋🏼 Hello there!
Hope you’re all having a lovely Easter/Spring Break. It’s been pretty quiet here in the UK, but the sun has been a lovely revelation. ☀️
💻 DATA POINT: A couple of research points this week that in conjunction are a worrying trend: marketers’ acquisition budgets are 26% larger than retention budgets, and invalid traffic wastes $63 billion (£47 billion) on ad spend annually. TikTok is the main culprit of wasted ad spend, followed by LinkedIn and X. Which makes me wonder - if the larger chunk of the budget (acquisition) has a huge chunk that is wasted, surely it would make sense to spend more on retention strategies with regular, episodic, audience-focussed content instead? If you think so too, come and talk to us.
📕 The Short Story
Artist Corporations (Resource about a new type of company)
My Quest To Solve Bitcoin’s Great Mystery (62-min read)
Anthropic’s Project Glasswing Wants To Secure Critical Software For The AI Era (Collaborative project)
Spike Jonze Directs On’s Shape Of Dreams Film For The Launch Of New Collab With Zendaya & Law Roach (3-min watch)
Whole New World: A Fan Project About The Artist Sophie (Fan resource/website)
Why Design Writing Needs Designers Writing (11-min read)
📣 A World With One Nation (10-min listen) 📣
The truly valuable skill here isn't the capacity to push yourself harder, but to stop and recuperate despite the discomfort of knowing that work remains unfinished, emails unanswered, other people's demands unfulfilled.
📚 The Long Story
Artist Corporations (Resource about a new type of company)
Storythings is a B Corp, and there’s a growing movement of organisations that in a similar way are rejecting the traditional capitalist form of operating. A newer structure being mooted is the Artist Corporation, or A-Corp, which is designed for creative people to keep control of their intellectual property and where the artistic mission comes first. A Senate Bill in Colorado could make it real and pave the way for the rest of the US.
My Quest To Solve Bitcoin’s Great Mystery (62-min read)
An impressive piece of investigative journalism from John Carreyrou and Dylan Freedman at the New York Times that looks into the identity of Bitcoin’s creator, who has hidden behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto for 17 years. Turns out he’s a 55-year-old British computer scientist named Adam Back - but the beauty of this piece is the single-mindedness with which the journalists got to the bottom of the story.
The Three- or Four-Hours Rule For Getting Creative Work Done (4-min read)
Oliver Burkeman tracks the creative habits of several well-known people and reminds us that 3-4 hours is the maximum we can really focus when we’re doing good work.
Anthropic’s Project Glasswing Wants To Secure Critical Software For The AI Era (Collaborative project)
There are a couple of ways to think about this: surely it’s a good thing that a consortium including Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorganChase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Palo Alto Networks is working on making sure AI software remains secure? Yes, but the very reason it’s been formed requires attention: “Claude Mythos2 Preview is a general-purpose, unreleased frontier model that reveals a stark fact: AI models have reached a level of coding capability where they can surpass all but the most skilled humans at finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities.”
Why The Age of AI Will Be Accompanied By A Rebirth Of Human Wisdom And Connection (11-min read)
Along with the incredibly fast changes that AI is creating in the world, this is a good reminder that human connection may be the thing that outlasts it all.
Spike Jonze Directs New On’s Shape Of Dreams Film For The Launch Of New Collab With Zendaya & Law Roach (3-min watch)
This is such a fun video to celebrate the launch of a collaborative line between the sportswear brand On, stylist Law Roach, and possibly 2026’s favourite talent of the moment, Zendaya (purely my opinion!). This piece explains why the video is a pretty smart move: “As platforms increasingly favour longer-form, narrative-led material, brands are investing in pieces that can operate across channels, from social media to editorial and festival environments.”
Whole New World: A Fan Project About The Legendary Late Artist Sophie (Fan resource/website)
There is something lovely about this (as-yet-incomplete) fan-produced project (as they say, it has nothing to do with the artist’s estate): fans who have attended a SOPHIE performance, worked with or represented SOPHIE, or have information about the whereabouts of any of her lost SoundCloud songs are encouraged to get in touch with the project to build this archive.
Why Design Writing Needs Designers Writing (11-min read)
Excellent read by Elizabeth Goodspeed in It’s Nice That, where she examines the work and writing styles of different designers including Ray Masaki, Michael Bierut, and Steven Heller, and how the two intersect: “Writing forces you to figure out exactly what your idea is; if it isn't working, you’ll know immediately. Where design is like a ballet – implicit ideas carried through form – then writing is closer to a theatre – your thinking has to be explicitly spoken.”
Meryl Streep And Anna Wintour On Power, Fashion And Acting The Part (20-min read)
I have included this piece for two reasons: 1) Because it has been produced by and with a collection of legends: Meryl Streep, Anna Wintour, Great Gerwig, Annie Leibovitz and Grace Coddington and that in itself is worthy of a read. And 2) it’s a great example of how the conversation format can be really useful in bringing characters to life on the page, as opposed to a more traditional essay or interview.
📣 A World With One Nation (10-min listen) 📣
Try and listen to this with your eyes closed, as Mohammed Elnaiem of the Decolonial Centre talks about a world in which border abolition has been achieved. Produced by us for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.
💌 Humans of LinkedIn
Dustin L from MissionCTRL, who works with companies on building trust, has released a report that answers the question ‘who does an impact-driven brand have to become when the world refuses to hold still?’
Drop us a line if you have anything you’d like us to share in a future edition of this newsletter, or of course if you have any comments or suggestions for us!
Have a great weekend!
Matt, Anjali, Hugh, and the team
B2B Content Marketing for brands that want to STAY HUMAN
